creators: Scott Snyder, Danny Miki, Greg Capullo
released: March 2014
publisher: DC Comics
*spoilers ahead*
The official site says that the “Dark City” chapter of Zero Year reaches its conclusion in this issue….but I don’t quite see a conclusion here. I see an already very long story arc–one that’s been interrupted not once, with a zero issue, but twice, with an unnecessary preview for a forthcoming trade.
I have a pretty good memory, but we’ve gotten to the point that certain intricacies of the plot are reaching back four or five issues. And while yes, I’ll eventually want to go back and reread this entire arc, when I’m reading one chapter a month, it’s becoming more stressful and less enjoyable. The tension has certainly heightened–with Batman’s apparent failure, the death of, erm, Doctor Death, and Nygma plunging Gotham into a watery demise, not to mention “Riddle #2,” whatever that might mean–but it is far from over. Nygma is still at large; so in my mind, the conclusion is still out of reach.
We got up close and personal with Doctor Death in this issue. While Miki and Capullo do a fantastic job making the Doctor both creepy and terrifying (also something we’ve come to expect from Snyder’s stories), but not so grotesque that we are unable to keep reading. Unfortunately, there was something about Batman’s final encounter with Doctor Death that felt….quite corny, to be honest. Batman, to quote The Incredibles, got Doctor Death monologuing–the drawn out explanation of how he became a villain. The banter between the two felt very predictable, particularly Doctor Death’s final “don’t forget me” line. While his backstory is crucial to the layered stories of intersecting webs of responsibilities and choices that have far reaching consequences….the manner in which it was done felt tried and true, and therefore tired. Perhaps we are so taken with Snyder’s new direction that glimmers of this familiarity comes off as ‘too easy.’
Capullo’s artwork is very precise to me; everything is incredibly proportional (except Doc Death, of course) and looks finely tuned, but sometimes each face seems to be making the same expression regardless of the emotional context – Bruce has a blandly happy expression when having a heart to heart with his parents in the movie theater, and then later, the policeman has a similar smiling face when he’s shocked to find something in the sewer. Perhaps lightly sketched faces were mistakenly penned in before they could be better calibrated to the writing, but I would like some more looseness in more emotional situations.
Ever since I started my pull list, Batman seemed to be an ‘untouchable’ series–that is, I never even entertained the thought of removing it. But that being said, with each passing issue, the more I am convinced that this story is meant to be read all at once, and not chapter by chapter.
Reading Art 